Google Surveys on Indonesia’s Ecommerce Industry

Hello again everyone! This month will end soon and of course, June is coming. Keep the spirit up guys, it's midyear already. Anyways, this time we’ll discuss about some facts about ecommerce industry in our beloved country, Indonesia.

Recently, ecommerce industry in Indonesia is growing rapidly, so everybody indeed fell curious about the behavior of Indonesia’s online shoppers. Google Indonesia, with the help of market research team from TNS, did a survey to figure out that behavior. This survey that involved 1,300 Indonesian suggests a strong growth for Indonesia’s ecommerce industry. Half of people who currently don’t shop online are interested in making online purchases. Two out of five non-online shoppers would consider buying fashion apparels via online. Rudy Ramawy, Google Indonesia’s Chief of Officer, sees a pattern where most Indonesian do online shopping because they prefer to save time rather than save money, in which this reason is good for the development of ecommerce in Indonesia. The main issue about online shopping in Indonesia is people have to feel secure and comfortable with ecommerce.

In general, there are 74.6 million internet users in Indonesia, a 22 percent increase compared to last year which is only 61.1 million users. It is predicted that the number will exceed 100 million in 2015. Moreover, Indonesia currently has 31.7 million people who spend at least three hours online on daily basis, in which this number also increase compared to last year. These general facts are the reason why Google believe in Indonesia’s ecommerce market.

Most Indonesian online shoppers are female. The most popular things bought are clothing, shoes and bag. There are several ways to conduct the online shopping; there are messenger groups (27 percent), online forum such as Kaskus and TokoBagus (26.6 percent), social media (26.4 percent) and conventional online shop websites (20 percent). People who shop through messenger said that they prefer this way due to the fact that they can know the seller personally, so they feel more secured.

However, price is still the main reason why people shift to online shopping rather than offline. In term of payment methods, 80.7 percent of the transactions are done via bank transfer, while via cash-on-delivery and credit cards are only 27.1 and 2.5 percent respectively. It is also revealed that 96 percent of Indonesian online shoppers confess that they have never bought original software products because they can simply find the pirated products with cheaper price in online shop, which indicates that law enforcement in Indonesia that handles piracy in online shops is still inadequate.